Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Vulnerable communities face growing threats: the climate crisis is outpacing scientists’ worst predictions and authoritarianism is no longer a distant possibility. So what can we do? We build. We shift away from reform and instead direct our energy toward creating entirely new systems.
From Ireland to Taiwan, experiments in citizens’ assemblies suggest new ways of governing. This essay argues that the limits of electoral politics are structural and that more participatory systems may be essential to meet the challenges ahead.
Why do people cling to falsehoods, even in the face of evidence? Both truth and lies serve social purposes, but holding onto reason becomes essential as we face climate change and rising Trumpism.
I discovered a new under the radar movement of otherwise inactive people talking to each other. These were citizens freely acting on their own initiative to link up with others as citizens with the aim of making real the promise of democracy.
The clock is ticking. In the upcoming months, we’ll need to strive for a leap even as we brace ourselves for a slide.
This is not a democracy. But it may be… soon… if we just acknowledge that it is not democracy. And start working toward making something that is.
If no large segment of the plutocratic class is likely to support serious climate action, then we must be prepared to break through its confines by building a much more democratic society. Only then will we be able to transition towards a sustainable society as quickly as we possibly can, and perhaps even get there.
At this time everyone, as parts of the human systems constituted by communities, polities and humanity as a whole, must consciously, collectively and urgently strive to realize the ecological civilization.
John Wood, Jr. is a national leader for Braver Angels, a former nominee for Congress, former Vice-Chairman of the Republican Party of Los Angeles County, musical artist and a noted writer and speaker on issues of political and racial reconciliation.
He addresses the question of “What Could Possibly Go Right?”
How do we transition to a low carbon energy system when plentiful resources are no longer available? Our past Horn of Plenty has become a trap from which we in the developed nations increasingly find difficult to extract ourselves.
Glacier Kwong is a political and digital rights activist born and raised in Hong Kong. She is founder of the NGO Keyboard Frontline and is a Research Fellow at Hong Kong Democracy Council in the US. She addresses the question of “What Could Possibly Go Right?”
Discussions of the threat to liberal democracy have neglected perhaps the most surprising source that is one of the major arcs of history of the last three decades: globalization.
